Sin and Skin

You probably know Cole Porter’s songs that say: 

“I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me.
So deep in my heart that you’re
really a part of me.”

And that other verse:

“Night and day
under the hide of me
There’s an oh, such a hungry
yearning burning inside of me.”

I must confess that, whenever I hear these lyrics, my own immediate thought is that maybe he ought to have seen a dermatologist.

I myself am, of course, no such expert – but one thing I can tell you is that the skin is considered to be the largest organ of the human body. And another fact is that it is prey to some of the nastiest conditions, caused by some of the most insidious infestations, to be found in the medical books.

But nasty or not, Nature has arranged that one of our five senses has a special relationship with the skin. The other four are highly localized – Sight depends on the eyes. Smell goes with the nose. Hearing is related to the ears. And Taste is mainly a job for the mouth. But TOUCH goes all over, although, as we are well aware, certain areas are much more sensitive than others. This seems to make good sense in connection with our palms and fingertips. But just why the arch parts of the soles of the feet should be so ticklish may have been a case of Evolution going the wrong way. It certainly doesn’t provide me personally with any particular benefit that I am aware of.

But, if it comes to that, what good does being ticklish do, on the whole, for Humanity in general?

And let us not forget – (how could we ever?) the role played by our skin and its sensitivities in the whole process of reproducing our species, all packed into that one little word: SEX.

This brings us to the other half of that scintillating duo, Skin and Sin. Whoever wrote the first book of the Bible obviously had this subject very much in mind. Right from the start, it comes up. We are told that the first Man and first Woman were naked and felt no shame – not until they ate the fruit of a forbidden tree and thereby acquired the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then they knew the evil of being unclothed, and covered themselves with fig leaves.

As it happens, I have a fig tree in my own garden. But sooner than try to make its leaves into any kind of garment, I would prefer to go naked entirely. However, once I stepped beyond my own property line, I would almost certainly be breaking some law, which would probably refer to public decency. It would seem that we haven’t really come that far from Adam and Eve. In order to be decent, you have to conform with some standard in your society of what is proper. I need hardly tell you that this brings us back to the parts of our skin connected with reproduction – and this applies even to people whose bodies (not necessarily their minds) are long past that activity.

Physical attraction is largely a matter of “Beauty,” which supposedly wise words assure us “is only skin deep.” A good reply to that might be that Character goes all the way to the bone.

But nudity continues to have its appeal in our culture. An outstanding example of that phenomenon goes back to 1912, and a notorious painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp, which he chose to entitle Nude Descending a Staircase. When it was first exhibited to the public, those who rushed to see it – remembering previous celebrated paintings of nude women – were disappointed, outraged, and puzzled. Why? Because this so-called Cubist work depicted nothing recognizable as a person – nude or otherwise – or, indeed, any object. Not even a Cube.

As for sin: apart from the doctrines of certain religious groups, the very concept seems somehow dated. In an age of mass murder, how can any activity be condemned as morally wrong? Nothing in our Constitution can be thus interpreted. (Perhaps the closest was the 18^th Amendment which inaugurated an era of “Prohibition,” which lasted just thirteen years.)

Finally, in an effort to combine the ideas of Skin and Sin in one epigram, I offer the following:

“I don’t like being rubbed the wrong way,
but it’s better than never being rubbed at all.”